I'll eat up all your crackers and your licorice

100 Words about Baseball

Why I Love Baseball

There is no clock
90 feet between bases is genius
There are secret signs
Hanging curveballs are sexy
Numbers are magic: 755, 56, 7, 61, 1.12
Tinker to Evers to Chance
Ivy at Wrigley
The Green Monster
The suicide squeeze
Cracker Jack
Walt Whitman liked it
Jackie Robinson and Pee-Wee Reese
It just feels American
The seventh-inning stretch
Superstition
Guys in tight pants
Bull Durham
Centerfield
There’s no crying in baseball
Cooperstown
A great play at the plate
Chatter
Pepper
High socks
Tradition
Spring training
Keeping score
The rubber game
The infield fly rule
162 chances

Become a Fan

September 2007

Grady Luke Borden arrived at 2:55 pm CDT today! He weighed 7 pounds, 12 ounces and was 20.75 inches long and in perfect health. Jillian is doing well, which isn't surprising since from the start of the pitocin to being ready to push was only 8 hours (5 with the epidural), and she probably didn't push 10 times total and he was here. She did a great job and made it all look easy. He's even been nursing away like a pro, much to her surprise and amazement. She and Gary are so happy and relieved that he's here and everything went so well.

We're all up and getting ready to head to Helen Keller Hospital for my sister Jillian to have her baby. It's still hard for me to believe that my baby sister is about to become a mother. I'm so thankful that I can be here for her, so excited for her and her husband Gary, and so happy and eager to see her little boy come into the world. Jillian has been so brave and really kept her sense of humor and practicality through all of this, and I'm so proud of her. It's been a bittersweet journey, I know -- we're all missing Mother so much through this.

When Alex was born, my mother knit him a blanket. Knowing she was sick and that she likely would not live to see my eight-years-younger sister have a child, she began knitting another blanket to put aside for her. I'm not quite sure when she started it, but she eventually became too sick to finish it. I took it home this summer, determined to finish it myself. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out the pattern, but the mother of a co-worker helped me out by reading the pattern, figuring out where Mother had stopped, and did the last few rows of the design repeat that I couldn't figure out. I was so happy to be able to finish the blanket, but it was a difficult experience, holding the needles she held, finishing the work that cancer made her unable to finish, doing the job she wanted so badly to do. She might not be physically here to hold her newest grandson, but he will surely be wrapped in her love by all of us in many ways.

Tonight at bedtime, Alex started in on his new pastime -- begging me not to take him to school. Some of the things he said tonight:

I'll just go to work with you and let you get work done.I'm sick. I think I'm shivering. I'm getting sick.I wish summer vacation would never end.I miss my old friends from kindergarten. I won't like being in third grade because I'll have to go to the pool. I'll never get done with school cause there's 19 grades**.

And my favorite:

I've decided to retire from school now.

*Devoted viewers of "The Office' probably get this. It gets a laugh about 25% of the time.**His school has 19 classrooms and somehow he has decided this means there are 19 grades.

So, it seems that I was laboring under some faulty assumptions. I didn't realize that the surgery which had originally been discussed was not the surgery my brother was having. Yesterday's procedure was minimally invasive - they went in via a small incision in front of his ear and went in through a small, natural opening of the skull. Details are sketchy, but about 75cc of spinal fluid spontaneously ejected from the cyst just from having some pressure relieved. I don't know what the source of the pressure relief was or if this is even an accurate description. But apparently the surgeon said that after measuring the fluid, they were happy with that reduction and didn't do anything to further drain or disturb it. So that's why the procedure was so short. A CT scan later in the day showed a sizable void in the area that was previously all fluid. All reports are good.

The downside is that even on morphine and Dilaudid, he now has the mother of all headaches, and this will probably continue for the next week or two. I can only imagine that as the brain tissue decompresses after being deformed by such a large mass, there would be a lot of pain. I guess this is a classic case of "you have to get worse to get better."

My brother is already awake and fine after his 15-minute brain surgery. Wow. It was definitely a cyst, which they drained but did not remove the sac. They'll monitor him and if it seems to be filling up quickly, they'll remove the sac, but that will require a more invasive surgery with more risks associated (apparently). Everything being said sounds like he'll go home tomorrow, but that sounds crazy me. Who knows.

As I type, my brother is in an operating room where his scalp will be opened, a small portion of his skull will be removed and a baseball-sized arachnoid cyst will be drained*. I'm just putting this out in the universe as a virtual good thoughts catcher...

The backstory is that about 5 weeks ago he was "struck by lightning." I use the quotes because the lightning apparently struck very, very close to him. Close enough that he thought he had been shot, he had a seizure and he was unconscious. In running tests to ensure he had no brain damage from the shock, a large mass was discovered. Over the next two weeks he had many more tests and saw many more doctors, one of whom told him that he thought what my brother had was actually three masses, two of which were tumors, one of which was likely malignant. That diagnosis has since been refuted, but I think we'll all breathe more easily when we hear that he made it through the surgery just fine and it was just a cyst filled with spinal fluid after all.

One thing is for sure, though: all the doctors have been amazed at how big this mass is. It is "impressively large" to use one doctor's words. And to think he wouldn't even know about it if it hadn't been for the lightning.

And for those whose first reaction to being involved in a lightning strike is "he should buy a lottery ticket!"...well, he actually did that at some point in the last few weeks (I think 3 weekends ago?). In keeping with his typical luck, he hit 5 of 6 numbers of the Florida lottery. What boggles my mind isn't the amount of money but the amount of amazing karma.

*They will try to remove the sac as well, and the small hole in his skull will be covered by a metal plate so that if they have to go back in at some point, it will be easier.

Let's start with the Good News, shall we? This morning went very smoothly except for the fact that Alex was too nervous to eat anything. We all walked to school together and I took him in to his classroom while Joe chatted with a teacher outside and then went to the gym to wait for morning program to start. Unlike kindergarten where the kids sat together at tables, first graders have individual desks...my baby has his own desk! How did this happen? We walked around looking for his desk and saw a lot of unfamiliar names along with some names Alex knows from his last class - Madisyn, Kaitlyn, Hunter, Mason...and Chris!! We thought Chris, his favorite friend from kindergarten, was going to be in another class. The relief on Alex's face when I pointed out Chris's name was just enough to bring tears to my eyes. After depositing his bookbag ("It's not a backpack, Mommy! It's a bookbag!"), we went to the gym for morning program.

Oh, one other bit of good news: Alex told me, "I think I'm just going to cry every day until Christmas. Then I'll be okay." Phew.

Needless to say, he's a tad bit anxious about school. He doesn't like getting up so early even on a good day (his school begins at 7:40 AM), big changes are unsettling to him, he has to transition back into the school routine, he is sad about not being with his teacher and classmates from last year. He got to lead his class back to the room after morning program and then he asked me if I could stay and help him with his work since he has a new math workbook that he doesn't know. HOW does a kid have performance anxiety before age six? Even though I work hard to give him praise that is about effort rather than intelligence, the message creeps in. Yikes.

I guess there really isn't any bad news. It's upsetting to see him upset and to know that today isn't going to be the only day of anxiousness. But that goes more in the "life happens" column and not the "bad news" column.

And now for the obligatory "first day of school" photograph, complete with closed eyes. (Hey, at least he was looking towards the camera for this one. I'll take what I can get these days.)

How is he so big? It just about broke my heart to see him cry today and be so nervous about school. I wasn't going to sit with him during morning program (99% of parents don't), and I watched him sometimes forget to be upset and then remember and start crying again. Another mom had gone over to sit with her daughter and notice his upset and began rubbing his back and encouraged him to sit in front of her, so once he had moved and was on the end of the row, I figured "what the hell" and went to sit with him. The other mom remarked about how her daughter (Madisyn) was so eager to get to the classroom and "strong like you are" she said to me, but that she (the mom) is all sad and weepy just like Alex. What a foursome we made.

I remember those first days -- I was also so nervous that I wanted to throw up, but I was also so excited. I loved school and everything about it. Sometimes I worry that Alex doesn't like school "enough" or that the emotional ups and downs are too much or that he won't fit in. But then I remember that all of that is MY STUFF. That's my frameworks about what kids are supposed to do, what school is supposed to mean, what is socially acceptable. And since I'm the grown up in this equation, I did the most grown-up, work-on-my-own-stuff thing I could do this morning--I reminded him that it was okay to be nervous, that a lot of other kids were nervous, that even mommies get nervous sometimes, and that I would be there to pick him up when the bell rang. Sometimes I think that is the single-most difficult job of parenting--just letting him be, and I mean that in the true sense of the verb and not "leaving him alone." He's going to make mistakes, he's going to do things that I would prefer he not do. All good. And the way it should be.

I've been a fashion magazine addict (and a magazine fan in general) for a very long time. The first leaves turning red are lovely, and that first day when the sky is clear and the humidity has vanished is a delight, but since I was about 12, nothing signaled "fall is coming!" for me quite like the heft of Seventeen magazine's back-to-school issue as I giddily pulled it out of my mailbox. Even now I love a thick stack of September issues - right now I have Bazaar, Vogue (US and UK - I'd have bought French Vogue if Borders had had it in stock), W, Vanity Fair, Elle, and Elle Accessories stacked next to the bed. Yes, they are mostly ads, and that's why I like them. I won't wax philosophical; I'll just say that high-end fashion ads are typically striking, often artistic, and sometimes inspirational. What I take away from an ad is sometimes the product being peddled, but often it is something somewhat incidental. For instance, if I pick up Elle Accessories, the first ad is for Guess shoes and handbags. Yes, silver is going to continue to be hot this fall (as will metallics in general), but what I see is that the model in one photo is wearing 4 of the hottest trends for fall makeup: thick, defined brows; winged eyeliner; red lips; and short, red nails.

I really started this because I wanted to record this feeling of nostalgia induced by a 2-pound magazine (I'm probably rounding up), but now that I've started flipping through Elle Accessories, I think I'll comment on a few ads...

Prada shoes - I'm not a huge fan of Prada, but these shoes are lovely, particularly the brown and toast colored ombre patent ones. (Actually it's degrade when when the dip-dye look isn't on fabric. Ombre is pretty hot this fall, too.) But the ad also shows glimpses of skirt and dress hemlines that appear to be covered in cassette tape fringe. Similar to a Bottega Veneta ad I saw recently with some very 20s, flapper-esque fringed dresses. But uglier. Intriguing, though. That's the weird thing about fashion -- even when it's ugly, it can still be captivating.